There's definitely an element of surrealism to Fog's lyrics. "A three-piece suit on me, a tutu on you," begins "Your Beef Is Mine" from Ditherer, Fog's latest album on Lex Records. "In an empty airplane hanger / at a table for two," singer/guitarist Andrew Broder continues, but that's just the set up for this gem: "And if you ever have / missed your flight to Leningrad / running down some airport stairs / semen running down your leg, / we're in this together. / Son, your beef is mine." On the page, it might seem just bizarre, but when Broder delivers the line in a sneer that owes a debt to Dylan while the rest of the band (bassist Mark Erickson and drummer Tim Glenn) churn away behind him, it somehow seems to make sense.
"I like that there's enough of a storyline to give it an impact," says Broder. We're sitting in Broder's backyard during a break in Fog's afternoon rehearsal. "I mean, you can get abstract with things to the point where you could basically be saying anything, and there is that approach. There are people that can make music like that and be saying almost total nonsense and make it fit, but I wanted there to be a component of realism, even in these bizarre surrealistic scenarios."
So Broder spins tales that revolve around white collar workers trapped in cubicles, hungry men made impotent by recalcitrant vending machines, unconvincing seminar speakers telling terrible jokes, and yes, tardy travelers with embarrassing secrets. The settings are often familiar, the details are usually a bit off, but the characters are unmistakably human—more Magritte than Dali in their surrealism.
"Yeah, you want to avoid the Dali influence in your lyrics," Broder laughs.
Since Fog's inception as a 4-track turntable-and-guitar experiment in the late '90s, Broder has always led the band with a touch of surrealism, although initially it showed up more in the music than in the lyrics. He's guided his primary artistic outlet through several EPs, albums, and lineups, but before he began work on Ditherer, he decided it was time for a little stability.
"It was a distinct decision," Broder says about the shift to a consistent trio lineup. "It came into being because there was a period where, a year and half ago now, we were doing shows and sometimes the shows were with five people and sometimes they were with four people. I personally had reached a point where I was sick of the ambiguity of the whole thing and also sick of working on my own. So this kind of lineup revealed itself out of necessity; out of, what is the core group of people gonna be that's gonna be able to devote the time and energy to doing this as their full-time thing. Once that was established—that it was going to be the three of us—that helped to dictate the parameters we were working under as far as how to write the songs and how to track them. So that was new and yeah, it totally gives it a different feel from all the other records before, which were more on my internal rhythm."
As such, the beginning of the record is something of a red herring, starting as it does with a squeal of feedback on "We Will Have Vanished." When the band crashes down into the verse, though, it's immediately clear that this is a toothier, more primal version of Fog than the one on display on their last record, 10th Avenue Freakout. The electronic and noise elements are still present in the sound, but it's clear that the crafting of this record was more a process of boiling down than building up.
"For this record it was more like me coming up with rough sketches," Broder says. "This was the first record where I actually made demos, which was helpful. You know, I'm just playing the demos for these guys and seeing what they had to add to it or take away from it or whatever. Before, with the previous stuff it was me working on my own more; the demo became the song."
"It was more of an editing process that happened collaboratively," adds Erickson. "Not to say that there wasn't a little bit of composition, but mostly it was just editing what Andrew had already done. And Andrew has a way of throwing a lot of things into the first draft and then you just gotta pare away the things that aren't necessary."
"One thing that I think Mark is strong with is timing of things," says Broder. "You transition from one part of the song to the next part of the song and whittling away how many bars are necessary to get the point across, or would a pause here be more effective way to give the next part more leverage—things like that. These little structural events, where I think more in terms of: here's the chords, here's the melody, here's where they change; and then these guys are good with: things should drop out here, things should come back in here, things should build up here."
"Not to get too technical with it," Erickson says, "but Andrew's good at vertical and Tim and I are better at horizontal—the process of putting things next to each other and arranging them in a certain way—and Andy's good at harmonic structure and melody."
Fog :: Ditherer
The conversation bounces around as comfortably as the music, and even if Fog is Broder's show, it's obvious on Ditherer that this is the work of a band and not a man, particularly on the second-to-last track, "On the Gallows." It opens with Broder's guitar thumbing a bass line against a fingerpicked melody as a gentle wheezing feedback floats in the background. His tenor sounds more gentle than elsewhere on the album, and slowly Glenn enters with some keening cymbal scrapes. A piano comes in, and then the drums and bass, and the song gradually works its way up into a fury over a spacious five minutes. It's the sound of a band coming around the long way, brimming with steady confidence and sympathetic musical resonance.
Most musicians don't start by making weird sound collages; most of them start rock bands. They flail wildly through different influences and approaches, missing the subtleties that make great bands great. If they stick with it long enough, they might start exploring some of those subtleties. They might begin to take the music they make apart piece by piece, to really see what makes it tick. And then a very few of those will work their way back to the simple tools they began with and find that great music relies neither on technical skill nor deliberate rejection of technical skill, and neither on sentiment nor cool detachment, but something much greater: honesty. Fog has come back around.
To that end, the album's final cut, "What's Up Freaks?", is illustrative. With harmony vocals courtesy of Low's Alan Sparhawk and Mimi Parker ("I wrote the song and we did a version where I was doing all the harmonies on my own," says Broder. "It just wasn't—it was OK, but it needed more of a group thing and I thought that an almost country, family-style type of singing would sound nice on there, so I thought about good combinations of people, and they just obviously sing so goddamn well together that they were the ones who came to mind first and they were totally down to do it. Me and Tom [Herbers, from Third Ear Studios] drove up to Duluth and just recorded their vocals in their house and yeah, they were very gracious to bless the mic."), Broder relates the simple story of learning of a friend's death. For Twin Cities residents, the mention of places like the Turf Club and a Darren who seems most likely to be Darren Jackson of Kid Dakota will bring a wave of warm recognition. But even if you've never been to Minnesota, the song's gospel vocal feel and casual but touching story will strike a chord.
But just because Ditherer is the most comfortable and self-assured Fog record yet doesn't mean that Broder hasn't been experimenting in other ways. The promotional video for the record includes a clip set to "Your Beef Is Mine" (which has to be the song title of the year, by the way) where the members of the band are roundly beaten at arm wrestling.
Asked if it was all a set-up or if they got beat fair and square by their opponent, Broder replies, "Oh yeah, he could beat me for sure. His arms were twice as big as mine. Well, we knew we were going to be defeated, but had we not planned that I don't think I would have beaten him anyway. I don't think I had arm-wrestled anyone in quite a long time before that, so I was out of practice. Not my forte."
